The world around us is changing and we must act if we which to save it. Without it, there is no adventures to have or places to explore.
In 1998, waking up on a Saturday meant cutting the yard with my great-grandfather, then sitting down and turning on Discovery Channel. In those days, the channel was still largely documentaries, and Saturday mornings the programming block was shows like Discovery Magazine, Discovery News, Outward Bound and Jeff Corwin. All of which, sucked me in and hooked me into the adventure mindset early on in my life. Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom made me dream of growing up to be a wildlife photographer. Men and women the likes of Jack Hannah, Steven & Terri Irwin, and Sir David Attenborough taught me the importance of loving the natural world around me. Combined with growing up the son of avid hunters on my father's side, I learned from a young age how tied to the planet we truly are.
A Life-Long Journey In Nature
Wonder Bound's mission is to encourage people to get outside. To explore the world around them and find adventure where ever they can. However, this has always really been just a means to an end.
From those early days, watching nature and history documentaries as a child, I've been in love with the planet we call home. What Carl Sagan called our "Pale Blue Dot." As I grew, so did my thirst for knowledge. Sir David Attenborough and his Planet Earth series came out while I was still a young adult and I was absolutely starstruck. It was at that period in my life I decided to stop experiencing nature through documentaries and start experiencing it. By 21, I had found myself out on trails and driving through the night to find a place I could see as many stars as possible.
The more I got on the trails, the more I explored, the more I experienced; the more I realized how fragile nature truly is.
The Name of the Game is Conservation
My first effort to protect the environment and the natural spaces of my life was a donation to the Sierra Club. Back then, I had no idea what conservation was. All I knew was that I wanted to photograph wildlife. To do that I had to have natural spaces for that wildlife to live. To ensure sure they had a place to live I had to protect those natural spaces.
In those days, the coffee table in my apartment was adorned with issues of National Geographic, Rock & Ice, and Digital Photography. A hand full of picture frames on my walls sported images of Great Blue Heron, The Great Dismal Swap, and Ospreys riding thermals in Back Back Wildlife Refuge. My Saturday mornings still consisted of nature and history documentaries when I wasn't up before the sun and out on an adventure or doing a shoot.
On the occasions I was home to watch those documentaries I started to notice a change. The nature documentaries were not informing the same way they had been in my childhood.
That Ticking is the Clock Counting Down
In those days, the panic of the 2008 financial crisis was finally starting to ease off. I had started taking part in my first "long-distance" adventures taking several trips states away from my home in Hampton, Virginia, and teaching myself the basics of backpacking. I still longed to photograph wildlife and did so whenever I could. My adventures on the other hand were no longer just to experience new things. A single documentary on economics caught my eye one evening and I learned all about the looming "Doom" of peak oil and the paranoia of a semi-informed youth took me down several Wikipedia rabbit holes. Understanding a bit more about the concept my fears of peak oil and a looming economic collapse eased, and my prepper mindset at the time changed.
Instead, my conservation mindset found a 2nd breath as I learned more and more about global climate change and its impact on the world around us. The nature documentaries I watched at the time had changed because they talked less and less to inform the people animals and habitats and more about how why those animals and habitats needed were at risk. How they were disappearing because their fragile ecosystems were starting to unravel, and that unraveling, was the result of human's impact on the planet.
In 2011, the human population hit 7 billion people. It was by no coincidence at that same time, the Javan rhino was declared officially extinct. Nor was it a coincidence that since then, planet Earth, the Pale Blue Dot we call home, has lost approximately 467 species according to the INUC.
The current, rapid, decline in biodiversity is so great that scientists in many fields have started declaring it our planet's 6th mass extinction event.
Many are familiar with our planet's previous mass extinction. Known as the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction most of us learned as children it was what killed the dinosaurs. What many don't know is that the way we know this event occur due to a layer of iridium, likely from a massive meteorite, that can be found around the world in the geological record known as the K-T Boundary. If we were to look at the earth's crust like the layers of a cake, we see an abundance of dinosaur fossils prior to the K-T Boundary, and it drops to none shortly after the boundary.
If our current impact on the planet through global climate change wasn't apparent, there are now not one but several similar boundaries in our geology that show evidence of human civilization's effect on our fossil record. In 2016 geologists even began to refer to a new geological epoch. That we are no longer living in the Cretaceous period but what they have coined as the Anthropocene, named such because it is a period in which humans are able to impact the planet as a whole. The biggest debate on the declaration is not whether our planet is in a new era, but rather when did we move into this new era.
Our Responsibility to Our Pale Blue Dot
While we have learned to be better about how we treat the animals, we are still bulldozing massive swaths of their habitats for farming and housing. We have striven to protect many of our natural spaces through an international network of National Park Systems and UNESCO World Heritage sites yet, they are still threatened with each passing day as global climate change from CO2 emissions and our reliance on fossil fuels drastically changes the environment and ecosystems that allowed them to become the places that have been for over thousands of year.
In 2006, Sir David Attenborough brought us Planet Earth. A Docu-series that focused on rarely seen species and environments. Ten years later, in 2016, he brought us Planet Earth 2. A Docu-series that focused on how threatened the species and environments of our planet are as a call to action to preserve them before they are gone.
My mission with Wonder Bound, while focused on exploring and adventure, has always been at its core, about conservation and protection. The more people I get outside in nature, the more people can see what is at stake, in the hopes that if Planet Earth 3 is made in 2026, it will show the species and ecosystems we saved rather than lament the ones we've lost. The fact is, every day is Earth Day. Every day we must remember that we only have one home, one Pale Blue Dot, and the clock is ticking. It is our responsibility to take whatever actions we can whether it is switching to renewable household objects, reducing our waste, reaching out to our representatives about renewable energy efforts, just simply raising awareness, or motivating people by showing what's at stake by encouraging them to get out and explore OlllO
To raise awareness of the various resources and efforts out there to save and protect our planet comment below with a foundation, a natural space, a resource, or even just something you do in your day-to-day life to lessen your impact!
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